FYI
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Sunil Abraham <sunil(a)mahiti.org>
Date: 11 November 2015 at 16:07
Subject: [Wikimediaindia-l] CIS-A2K 2.0 and new Programme Associates
To: Wikimedia India Community list <wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Dear Wikimedians,
It gives me immense pleasure to announce that CIS-A2K
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CIS-A2K> is implementing its new model of
working - CIS-A2K version 2.0. This model takes on board many of the
criticisms that have been made of our work so far.
We will be eliminating the role of Program Director in this version, and I
(from July, 2015) am the person at the Centre for Internet and Society in
charge of programming under the WMF grant. Nirmita Narasimhan (from this
month onwards), Policy Director will be assisting me. This will result in a
reduction of the budget.
As part of this version 2.0, CIS-A2K would try to engage communities
towards an in depth analysis of community engagement, and take A2K
programme closer to the community by contracting Program Associates (PA).
Each of the five focus language areas(FLAs): Kannada, Konkani, Marathi,
Odia and Telugu will have one PA each working from the city or town where
most of the community members operate. This will help CIS-A2K understand
the language community more closely and work in accordance with needs of
the community. Thus avoiding duplication of resources and bringing focus to
the activities organised. The PAs will be directly managed and be held
accountable by members of each language community who will assign any work
they want to be done. CIS-A2K team will provide an additional layer of
supervision and oversight. This will reduce need for CIS staffers to travel
from Bengaluru for every event/activity.
In addition, the existing employees at CIS-A2K would now be working for all
the five FLAs in a more specialized role as follows:
Pavanja <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pavanaja> : Would be
responsible for creating movement resources such as handbook, tutorial
videos, etc, and shall plan for creation, printing and distribution.
Rahmanuddin
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:%E0%B0%B0%E0%B0%B9%E0%B1%8D%E0%B0%AE%E…>
: Would operate as technical liaison person.
Subhashish <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Psubhashish> : Will help
Wikipedians create blogs on Wikimedia blog and report all events happening
around, along with media publication and coverage of events organised by
the communities and A2K team.
Tanveer <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Lahariyaniyathi> : Would be
responsible for all insitutional partnerships and content donation
activities. Communities are encouraged to get in touch with Tanveer if they
want any specific institution to be explored for Wikipedia activities.
This will enable the above core A2K team members to have multiple touch
points with the FLA Wikimedia communities. Unlike the previous model where
a single Programme Officer was solely responsible for activities for a FLA.
Abhinav
<https://mr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%A4%B8%E0%A4%A6%E0%A4%B8%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%AF…>
and Tito Dutta <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Titodutta> would be
Program Associates and will be working on Marathi Workplan and policy level
discussions respectively.
We have ensured that the PA selection process is done by community
consensus.
Announcements were sent out on the FLA Wikipedia village pumps in the 2nd
and 3rd week of August.
A community nomination was expected to set the process rolling, but with
multiple people applying, A2K team asked the applicants to translate some
of the important movement resources documents (These were handbooks
regarding Editing Wikipedia
<https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/18/Editing_Wikipedia_broch…>,
Illustrating Wikipedia
<https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Illustrating_Wikipedia_brochure.pdf>,
GLAM handbook
<https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WMUK_GLAM_booklet_2014.pdf>, Free
licenses handbook
<https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Introduction_to_free_licenses_2010…>and
so on) to assess the applicants understanding of Wikimedia projects.
The translations sent by the participants were put up for community members
to review (these were uploaded by candidates on commons.wikimedia.org). The
reviews did not offer any decisive inputs regarding finalising PA position.
It was also felt based on visit and conversations with Telugu Wikipedia
community members, that a selection committee should be constituted for
selecting PA for each language.
*Telugu -*
Telugu announcement was made on 19 August, Candidate A applied on 20
August. As this was the only application, the application deadline was
extended to 15 September and an announcement in this regard was put out on
7 September on Telugu Wikipedia village pump. Candidate B and Candidate C
submitted their applications on 26 September and 28 September respectively.
Mr. Ravi Vyzasatya, Dr. Rajsekhar and Ms. Sujatha were part of the
selection committee. Selection committee members and their profiles:
*Ravi Vyzasatya*: Mr. Ravi Vyzasatya with username వైజాసత్య is one of the
earliest Telugu Wikipedians and sysop on Telugu Wikipedia and Telugu
Wiktionary. He has been a Wikipedian for more than 10 years. His areas of
interest are research articles, biographies of personalities. He is
instrumental in creation of village articles on Wikipedia using his bot,
which has created close to 24,000 articles on Telugu Wikipedia. He also
proposes rules and policies on Telugu Wikipedia. By profession he is a
researcher with expertise in Molecular Biology, Immunology, Cell Biology.
*Rajasekhar*: Dr. Rajasekhar, username Rajasekhar1961, has been a Telugu
Wikipedian for over 8 years and is a bureaucrat & sysop on Telugu
Wikipedia, sysop on Telugu Wikisource and Telugu Wiktionary. He was one of
the senior most Wikipedians with interest in wide range of areas like
Biology, Telugu language, Yoga, Telugu personalities, Medicine and
Transportation. He is a pathologist by profession. Interesting thing is
that he has turned his lab into Wikipedia help centre and has provided his
phone number publicly for anyone to call and know about Wikipedia.
*Sujatha*: Ms. Sujatha Thummapudi, username T.sujatha, has been a Telugu
Wikipedian for over 9 years and is a sysop on Telugu Wikipedia, Wiktionary
and Wikisource. She has been writing articles on spirituality, religion,
places and so on. She was part of the Lilavathi's daughters project and
lead the project in Telugu. She, along with her husband Mr. Sriramamurthy
garu has been actively working in Te Wiktionary, Te Wikipedia and Te
Wikisource as well.
Mr. Ravi Vyzasatya asked the three candidates two questions and the
candidates answered the same on Tewiki village pump. Later A2K team asked
the selection committee to send us their decision.
The selection committee for Telugu came to a consensus and selected Mr.
Pavan Santhosh as the candidate for the post of PA for Telugu for a period
of 3 months on trial basis. If the performance is satisfactory during this
period, we can continue with him. His profile is given below:
*Pavan Santhosh* <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pavan_santhosh.s>:
He has been a very active Telugu Wikipedian with more than 16000 edits to
his credit and has worked extensively to improve content and quality in
Telugu Wikipedia, Wikisource & Wiktionary. He was the joint secretary of
the committee that organized the 11th anniversary of Telugu Wikipedia. He
has been an Individual Engagement grantee from Wikimedia Foundation for the
project “Making Telugu content accessible”. He has organized and
co-organized many meetups, events and outreach programs.
* Kannada -*
The announcement for PA was made on Kannada Wikipedia village pump on
August 12, It was postponed twice to 15 September and 15 October. The
decision was given by selection committee in last week of October.
Selection committee members and their profiles:
*Tejas Jain (*User:Teju2friends*): *Software engineer by profession. Has
been an active Kannada Wikipedian since 2007. Has more than 4500 edits in
Kannada Wikipedia, about 250 in Kannada Wiktionary, about 35 in Kannada
Wikiquote. He has also contributed to other Wikimedia projects. He has
written useful scripts. He has participated in many Kannada Wikipedia
events, meetups and conducted outreach programs.
*Harish M G (*User:M G Harish*): *Software engineer by profession. Has been
an active Kannada Wikipedian since 2006. He has more than 2700 edits to his
credit in Kannada Wikipedia, about 105 in Kannada Wikiquote. He has been an
administrator of Kannada Wikipedia. he has written useful scripts. He has
participated in many Kannada Wikipedia event, meetups and conducted many
outreach programs.
*Vikas Hegde (*User:Vikashegde*): *Software engineer by profession. Has
been an active Kannada Wikipedian since 2009. He has nearly 800 edits to
his credit in Kannada Wikipedia and about 35 edits in Kannada Wikiquote. He
has also contributed to other Wikimedia projects. He has been the major
contributor to some projects in Kannada Wikipedia. He has participated in
many Kannada Wikipedia events and meetups. He is also a well known Kannada
blogger and written some useful blogs about using Kannada in IT.
The selection committee has agreed to appoint Mr. Ananth Subray for a
period of 3 months on trial basis. If the performance is satisfactory
during this period, we can continue with him. Here is a profile of Mr.
Ananth Subray. As he is a student, he would be employed as an intern.
*Ananth Subray* (User:Ananth subray): Mr. Ananth Subray is a 2nd year BSc.
(PCM) student at Christ University, Bengaluru. He has been part of the
Wikipedia Education Program in the university from last 2 years. Having
been recommended by the faculty and his other fellow batch-mates, he also
helped us to run the Wikisource activities for the Education Program for
the junior batches in his university. Ananth is fluent in Kannada, Hindi
and Telugu apart from English. Even though new in the Wikimedia community,
Ananth has been a fast learner and is active as a Wikimedian. He has
participated in the Mediawiki Train-the-Trainer programme conducted by
CIS-A2K this year.
* Konkani*
The Konkani Wikipedia community has selected Ms. Melissa Simoes as the
consensus candidate to become the next PA for Konkani. Here is her
profile.
*Melissa Simoes (User:Melissa Simoes on gom.wikipedia.org
<http://gom.wikipedia.org>)*: She is a graduate and has a degree in
education. She has worked as teacher in a high school at Goa. She has been
a very active Konkani Wikipedian and has contributed whole heartedly to
Konkani Wikipedia. She had important contribution in making Konkani
Wikipedia go live. Writing poems is one of her hobbies.
* Odia *The announcement for Odia Wikipedia PA was made on 14th August, but
was postponed to 10th October as one of the previous selection committee
members requested that he would want to apply for the post. A new selection
committee was formed. The selection committee gave their decision on 1
November.
Selection committee members and their profiles
*Mrutyunjaya*(User:MKar): most active Wikimedian in the Odia Wikimedia
community so far. Admin on Odia Wikipedia and Odia Wikisource. Been active
in building the "WikiTungi" (Odia Wikimedia user group) in Nalconagar where
he has brought many Wikimedians onboard. Active in conducting community
surveys, designing and implementing WikiProjects and WEP; discussion and
content acquisition for Wikisource from many authors.
*Shitikantha Dash*(User:ଶିତିକଣ୍ଠ ଦାଶ): OR WT admin, active in WP and WT.
created over 100K words by using a 1930 lexicon, created an encoding
converter for Shreelipi Oriya font-Unicode conversion. MWTTT participant
and active tech contributor in OR WM community. Currently pursuing MTech in
Rourkela, Odisha.
*Harihar Prasad Satapathy(**User:Hpsatapathy)*: Works in the court at
Rayagada. Active since 2014 on OR WP and EN WP. The articles he created
about Rayagada distt. been the highest no. of articles ever created about
any distt. on OR WP.
The selection committee has agreed to appoint Mr. Sailesh Patnaik for a
period of 3 months on trial basis. If the performance is satisfactory
during this period, we can continue with him. Here is a profile of Mr.
Sailesh Patnaik. As he is a student, he would be employed as an intern.
*Sailesh Patnaik*(User: Saileshpat): Mr. Sailesh Patnaik is a Mechanical
Engineering student at KIIT University, Bhubaneswar. He has been active in
Wikimedia Movement from last three years. He is also involved and
coordinating with CIS-A2K from 2013 for the growth of Odia Wikipedia and
strengthening the community. He is already handling the social media
accounts and outreach programs for Odia Wikipedia.
Hope the Wikipedia communities in India will continue to guide us and hold
as accountable with their feedback and criticism during A2K version 2.0 so
that we can continue to evolve and change the programme.
Best wishes,
Sunil
Ph: +91 9611100817
_______________________________________________
Wikimediaindia-l mailing list
Wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
--
Best!
Subhashish Panigrahi
Programme Officer, Access To Knowledge
Centre for Internet and Society
@subhapa / https://cis-india.org
Dear all,
Though we added this announcement in our September newsletter, it has
not delivered in most mailing lists. So, I am sharing this again.
CIS-A2K invites applications from Indian and Indic Wikimedians for the
upcoming Global Congress on Intellectual Property and the Public
Interest.[1] The event, happening during December 15-17 in New Delhi, is
the most significant event on the calendar for scholars and policy
advocates working on intellectual property from a public interest
perspective.
The last date of application is 27 October. Indian and Indic Wikipedians
are welcome to apply in the /event page[2]/ to apply.
/1. https://goo.gl/1uOJ3E/
2. https://goo.gl/kAVkrM
--
Best!
Subhashish Panigrahi
Programme Officer, Access To Knowledge
Centre for Internet and Society
@subhapa / https://cis-india.org
Hi,
Apologies for cross-posting. This post is of interest to community members based out of Mumbai. I post on the India list because there may be members who are not on the Mumbai list. I apologize for this as well.
In September, the Mumbai community passed 5 year mark since holding the first meetup in a cafe in Bandra, Mumbai. However, the community has not had a meetup since January 2014, per - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Mumbai -. I was wondering if Wikipedia 15 in 2016 maybe a good opportunity to revive the meetups in Mumbai.
Warm regards,
User:Prad2609
Sent from Yahoo Mail on Android
Dear all,
CIS-A2K would like to share with you the newsletter below for the month of August 2015. We look forward to hear any feedback or input you might have.
Odia Wikipedia (available at <https://or.wikipedia.org> or.wikipedia.org), an Indian-language Wikipedia project, celebrated thirteen years of free knowledge contribution in June 2015. It was one of the first four Indic Wikipedias (Assamese, malayalam and Punjabi being the other three)to have started in 2002. The first edit on the Wikipedia was made on 3 June 2002. Currently the project has over 8,900 articles and about 17 active editors (also known as "uikiali"). The voluntary editor community has put its efforts into acquiring valuable content, re-licensing them under Creative Commons (CC) licenses, and building tools for acquiring more encyclopedic content from various sources.
Odia Wikipedia community assessment survey June 2015. It gives an overview about the various hindrances for the growth of Odia Wikipedia and the community.
During the thirteenth anniversary celebrations, the community came together to assess community needs, address issues that had been identified earlier via irc and mailing list discussions, and identify priority areas to focus on in the future. Odia Wikipedia administrators Mrutyunjaya Kar and Subhashish Panigrahi designed a needs assessment survey. (https://or.wikipedia.org/s/tnp) Participating Wikimedians were asked to discuss various problems they face in editing and outreach two major areas that ensures quality standards. .
Two-fifths of participants said that problems with the rendering of Odia characters in different operating systems, ignorance or lack of more documentation about enabling encoding for Odia, input methods and keyboard layouts, and other font- and keyboard-related issues as the major reason for low readership and contribution on Wikipedia.
. . .Read more in the Wikimedia blog at: http://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/08/21/odia-wikipedia-celebrates-13/
== Event organized/participated ==
(CIS-A2K events page: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CIS-A2K/Events)
⬤ Telugu Wikipedia edit-a-thon at Annamacharya library (http://cis-india.org/openness/events/rare-telugu-religious-and-historical-w… ):
On 6 August a Telugu Wikipedia edit-a-thon was conducted at Annamacharya library to preserve rare Telugu literature text. Annamacharya library has a rare collection of the religious and historical works in Telugu language. This event was conducted by Telugu Wikipedia Community and the Centre for Internet & Society's Access To Knowledge program. The second iteration of the event was organized on 31 August.
⬤ Tamil Virtual University workshop (http://cis-india.org/openness/events/workshop-on-digital-collaborations-in-… ):
On 8-9 August, a two-day long workshop on digital collaborations in Tamil-language was organized by Tamil Virtual University, Anna University Campus, Chennai. U.B.Pavanaja, on behalf of CIS-A2K, participated in this event. Four major topics discussed during the event were: Digitization, Research and Development, e-learning and Open source and Outreach.
⬤ SDM Ujire Kannada workshop:
(http://cis-india.org/openness/events/kannada-wikipedia-workshop-at-shree-dh…)
CIS-A2K has ongoing partnership with SDM College, Ujire. The college's academic year started on 12 August. It was followed by a one-day workshop where the students were introduced to editing in Kannada Wikipedia. The head of the journalism department of the College Bhaskar Shetty and others supported the event.
⬤ Tulu Wikipedia edit-a-thon at Mangalore (http://cis-india.org/openness/wikipedia-edit-a-thon-in-mangalore-to-bring-t… ):
A three-day edit-a-thon was organized between 14-16 August in Mangalore for bringing good quality content in Tulu Wikipedia. This event, organized in collaboration with the Tulu Sahitya Academy and Ramakrishna Pre University College, saw 30 Wikipedia editors participating and creating about 89 new articles. 12 of these 30 participants crossed more than 10 edits. Some of the new participants faced problems with using the input methods and the Wiki-markup. It is important to note that because of the lack of addition of Tulu-alphabet code points in the Unicode chart, and the speakers being well conversant in Kannada, they are using Kannada script for Tulu Wikipedia Incubator project. There is a plan to organize a monthly meetup and/or edit-a-thon to continue the momentum these editors have brought in.
⬤ Kannada Wikipedia workshop at DSERT (http://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/edit-a-thon-to-improve-kannada-langu…):
A Kannada Wikipedia workshop was organized between 18-20 August at the Department of State Educational Research and Training to improve science-related articles that are part of the Government of Karnataka's high school syllabus. During the workshop the lecturers were taught about the basics of Kannada Wikipedia, article editing policies, Kannada input, creating and editing articles on Kannada Wikipedia. U.B. Pavanaja and Tito Dutta from CIS-A2K conducted the workshop, behalf of CIS-A2K.
=== Sau Dhuni Teen project ===
⬤ Wikipedia workshop in Pune (http://cis-india.org/openness/events/wikipedia-workshop-in-theme-of-sou-dhu…:
A Wikipedia workshop was organized at Srimati Savitribai Phule Pune University on 20 August 2015. Under the scope of “Sau Dhuni Teen” project, the workshop focused on building resources in Indian languages for women's studies on Wikipedia.
⬤ Wikipedia workshop in TISS, Mumbai:
(http://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/sau-dhuni-teen-project-wikipedia-wor…)
A two-day long and multilingual Wikipedia workshop was organized at the Women's Studies Department of Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai between 22-24 August. This was an outreach event conducted under the scope of the "Sau Dhuni Teen" project.
== Blog posts ==
⬤ Pavanaja, U. B. "Tulu Wikipedia edit-a-thon in Mangalore" (http://goo.gl/ZxJVnS) (18 August 2015)
⬤ Pavanaja, U. B. "Edit-a-thon to improve Kannada-language science-related Wikipedia articles" (http://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/edit-a-thon-to-improve-kannada-langu…) (19 August 2015)
⬤ Panigrahi, Subhashish. "Odia Wikisource has a new Wikisourcer, and he is the youngest in the Odia Wikimedia community!" (http://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/kisorachandrananachampu-on-odia-wiki…) (21 August 2015)
== Media coverage ==
1. ಬೆಳ್ತಂಗಡಿ:ಎಲ್ಲಾ ಕಾಲಕ್ಕೂ ಲಭ್ಯ ಇರುವ ಸ್ವತಂತ್ರ ಹಾಗೂ ಮುಕ್ತ ವಿಶ್ವಕೋಶ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯಾ-ಪವನಜ (http://cis-india.org/openness/news/sahil-online-august-14-2015 ) SahilOnline; 14 August 2015
2. ಗ್ರಾಮೀಣ ಪ್ರದೇಶದ ಆರ್ಥಿಕ ಪ್ರಗತಿಯಿಂದ ದೇಶದ ಆರ್ಥಿಕ ಪ್ರಗತಿ ಸಾಧ್ಯವಾಗುತ್ತದೆ ( <http://cis-india.org/openness/news/mangalorean-dotcom-august-13-2015> http://cis-india.org/openness/news/mangalorean-dotcom-august-13-2015 ) Mangalorean.com; 13 August 2015
3. Telugu religious and historical work preserved at Annamacharya library to come on Wikisource! ( <http://www.thehansindia.com/posts/index/2015-08-07/Rare-Telugu-religious-an…> http://www.thehansindia.com/posts/index/2015-08-07/Rare-Telugu-religious-an… ) The Hans India; 7 August 2015
This newsletter is also available on Meta at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CIS-A2K/Reports/Newsletter/August_2015
Dear all,
CIS-A2K would like to share with you the newsletter for the month of
July 2015. We look forward to hearing any feedback or input you might have.
The Goan Konkani Wikipedia (available at gom.wikipedia.org) has gone
live after spending nine long years in incubation.
Konkani Wikipedia has many heroes, Melissa Simoes and Darshan Kandolkar
are two of the many long-term contributors who joined Konkani Wikipedia
during the Konkani Wikipedia @ Goa University program and are still
active even after the program was formally concluded. Darshan is an
Assistant Professor at the Government College Pernem in Goa. His
professor at Goa University, Dr. Madhavi Sardesai—who passed away last
year—played a vital role in inspiring him to pursue higher studies in
Konkani. Darshan realized that there is a lot to be written in Konkani
when he was introduced to Wikipedia, and after that, he became dedicated
towards contributing to the project.
The Konkani Wikimedia community has been using social media actively to
promote the Konkani Wikipedia project, and to celebrate the successes of
its contributors. After Melissa became the top contributor to the
project, her fellow editor Luis Gomes congratulated her. That brought
Melissa into the spotlight, gaining the attention of editors from the
global Wikimedia community. The community is continuing a tradition to
rewarding the most prolific contributor of each month as the "Wikipedian
of the Month".
More in the Wikimedia blog:
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/07/15/konkani-wikipedia-goes-live/
== Event organized/participated ==
* Christ university Undergraduate program (July 1-8):
Students were initiated into the Wikimedia activities with hands on
sessions of typing on Wikisource. Faculty of the Christ University
helped the A2K team in deciding on the texts that were to be typed.
These texts will provide much needed impetus for Wikisource related
activities in Indian Languages. Wikipedia Education Programme at Christ
University received support from Ravishankar.A of the Tamil Wikimedia
community and Sayant Mahato from Sanskrit Wikimedia community.
* St. Aloyisius college, Mangalore (July 4-5):
Tulu and Kannada Wikipedia workshops were conducted in St. Aloysis
College, Mangalore. Tulu Wikipedia is in Incubator and a small community
is growing in Mangalore. Pavanaja U.B. and Rahmanuddin Shaik
participated in this events.
* MediaWiki Train the Trainer Program2015
A four-day long train-the-trainer program aimed at building leadership
among technical contributors to Indic language Wikimedians in the areas
of bugs, bots--Pywikipedia and Auto Wiki Browser, various MediaWiki
tools, and translations. This program was organized during June 24-27 by
CIS-A2K with support from Ravishankar.A from Wikimedia India, MediaWiki
developers Pavithra H., Yogesh Omshivaprakash H.L. and Harsh Kothari,
and Tamil Wikimedian Dineshkumar Ponnusamy.
* Wikimania 2015, Mexico City:
** Learning Day (15 July 2015):
A whole day dedicated for evaluation of strategies and activities by
various major stakeholders of the Wikimedia movement; community members
who lead major activities, Wikimedia chapters, affiliate organizations
and Wikimedia Foundation itself. There were several group activities,
exchange of ideas focused on project and community level outreach and
other activities, tools and techniques, and best practices. Subhashish
Panigrahi participated in this event.
** Talk on Guerrilla GLAM:
Subhashish presented about doing GLAM the guerrilla way--by sharing many
frugal practices, and ways around acquiring cultural content to enrich
Wikipedia and Wikipedia's sister projects where the conventional GLAM
partnerships do not fetch much success.
* * Panel discussion "Edit-a-thons for bridging the gender gap on Wikimedia:
A panel discussion centered around using edit-a-thons as an outreach
tool among women, measuring its impact and comparing it with other modes
of outreach. Subhashish along with Malayalam Wikimedian Netha Hussain as
moderator, and other fellow Wikimedians in the panel Rohini Lakshane,
Emily Temple-Wood, Siko Bouterse (WMF) and Heather Walls participated in
the discussion.
** Indic meetup:
During Wikimania, an Indic meetup was organized where Wikimedians from
India, Bangladesh and Nepal representing various language communities,
Wikimedia India, Wikimedia Bangladesh, Wikimedia Nepal, and Access To
Knowledge (CIS-A2K) gathered to discuss about various challenges,
cross-community collaborative projects, organizing larger events, and
strategies to grow the Wikimedia movement in South Asia.
* "Classical Languages In The Digital Era" conference, Central Institute
of Indian Languages, Mysore (Participated by Tanveer Hasan on 17 July 2015):
Organized by Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL), Mysore this
conference was aimed at discussing about the future of Indian classical
languages in the digital era. Classical languages that are more of
confined within the print media have to find their way out to reach to
masses using the digital media. Linguists, researchers and scholars
representing various Indian languages gathered at CIIL where Tanveer
Hasan from CIS-A2K participated.
* Hackathon at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay (28 June 2015)
Around 35 students (25 male and 10 female) and interns together from IIT
Bombay participated in a hackathon organized in the institution by the
Wikimedia community led by Santosh Singare and Rahul Deshmukh.
Rahimanuddin Shaik from CIS-A2K delivered a presentation on Wikidata and
bots and Abhinav Garule supported in organizing the event. The students
formed groups and worked on brainstorming about different bots.
* Odia Wikipedia Turning 13 this June 3 (Organized by the Odia Wikipedia
Community and supported by CIS-A2K; Institute of Physics, Sachivalaya
Marg, Sainik School PO, Gajapati Nagar, Bhubaneswar, Odisha; June 3, 2015):
The Odia Wikipedia turned 13 on June 3. The community gathered in
Odisha's capital city Bhubaneswar for a day to celebrate this day.
During the thirteenth anniversary celebrations, the community had a day
long session to assess community needs, address issues, and identify
priority areas to focus on for the future. A legacy encoding →
Unicodeencoding converter was released publicly during the event. This
'encoding converter' is a community project led by Wikimedians
Jnanaranjan Sahu and Manoj Sahukar and converts the encoding systems
used by Odia newspapers, the Odisha government websites and many
publications into Unicode.
== Blogs ==
* Panigrahi, Subhashish. Konkani Wikipedia Goes Live After 'Nine Years'
of Incubation (July 18, 2015)
* Patnaik, Sailesh. Odia Wikipedia meets Google Developer Group
* Hasan, Tanveer. Magic words (29 July 2015)
* Hasan, Tanveer. Train the Trainer: Running effective outreach
activities in India (30 July 2015)
== Team updates ==
Tito Dutta, Luis Gomes and Abhinav Garule have joined the CIS-A2K team
as Programme Associates from March this year. Tito will be working for
internal documentation and resource building, and Luis and Abhinav will
be implementing the Konkani and Marathi work plan respectively along
with community liaison.
Communications:
* Twitter: https://twitter.com/CISA2K
* Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CISA2K
* Visit us at: https://cis-india.org
This newsletter is also available on Meta at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CIS-A2K/Reports/Newsletter/July_2015
--
Best!
Subhashish Panigrahi
Programme Officer, Access To Knowledge
Centre for Internet and Society
@subhapa / https://cis-india.org
HI,
It's quite depressing that none of the Wikipedians from Mumbai as per my
knowledge were invited to participate except this sarcastic invite.
Personally, at-least I'm depressed. If things has to go secret, would
appreciate not to get it in mailing list.
Thanks!
Regards from Mumbai,
Karthik Nadar.
On Wed, Jul 1, 2015 at 2:26 PM, Jayantilal Kothari <jayantilalkkd(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
> Hi Abhinav,
>
> Any Wiki Sprint happening in July-August. I'll be in Mumbai during that
> period and I would like to participate.
>
> Regards,
>
> Jayantilal
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On Sat, Jun 27, 2015 at 7:44 PM, Abhinav Garule <abhinavgarule(a)gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> We have rescheduled this Wiki Sprint on 29th June 2015, Monday. 11:00 am
>> at same location(Studio X,Fort, Mumbai).
>> Please join us for this event.
>>
>> On Fri, Jun 19, 2015 at 10:57 AM, Abhinav Garule <abhinavgarule(a)gmail.com
>> > wrote:
>>
>>> This event is postponed due to heavy rain.
>>> On Jun 8, 2015 4:47 PM, "Abhinav Garule" <abhinavgarule(a)gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Dear Wikipedians,
>>>>
>>>> We are planning to hold a Wiki Sprint at Studio X,Fort, Mumbai on theme
>>>> (Hindustani Music and Performing Spaces in Mumbai) partnered with CILHE,
>>>> TISS, Mumbai on 19th June 2015 and there is opportunity to attend musical
>>>> event after Wiki Sprint.
>>>>
>>>> We are looking for 4-5 Wikipedians preferably from Pune or Mumbai.
>>>> Interested Wikipedians please contact me.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Thanks and Regards,
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Abhinav Garule
>>>> +91 9404 9636 60
>>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Best Regards,
>>
>> Abhinav Garule <https://www.facebook.com/abhinav.garule>
>> +91 9404 9636 60
>> Coursera Language Co-ordinator.
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Wikimediaindia-l mailing list
>> Wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>> To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
>>
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikimediaindia-l mailing list
> Wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
>
>
Dear Wikimedians,
It gives WMIN and CIS-A2K great pleasure to announce that we have started
preparations for MediaWiki Train the Trainer Program. It is a matter of
grave concern that while the Indian Language Wikipedias are slowly improving
their content and expanding their volunteer base, there is very less and
often zero representation from the Indian Language Communities towards
MediaWiki software and the available tools around.
CIS-A2K intends to bridge this gap by creating and grooming 'tech' leaders
in the MediaWiki sphere from the existing Indian Language Wikipedians.
MediaWiki Train the Trainer program aims to facilitate discussions around
nurturing leadership regarding tech related issues, file bugs that hinder
the growth of Indian Language Wikipedias, active contribution towards
improving the existing MediaWiki software and understanding the importance
of mediating technology for outreach activities. The 4 day residential event
will happen in last week of June, 2015.
Exact dates and venue will be announced soon.
We welcome specific issues that should be discussed during the MWTTT as well
as feedback and suggestions. Please write to us if there are any concerns.
The event page :
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CIS-A2K/Events/Mediawiki_Train_the_Trainer_P
rogram
Thanks and regards,
Pavanaja
----------------------------------------------------
U.B. Pavanaja, MSc, PhD
Programme Manager <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pavanaja> - Indian
languages,
Access to Knowledge program
The Centre for Internet & Society
Cross post :)
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Amir E. Aharoni <amir.aharoni(a)mail.huji.ac.il>
Date: Thu, Apr 30, 2015 at 6:53 PM
Subject: [Mediawiki-i18n] ContentTranslation gets to 2000
To: wikimedia-l <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>, mediawiki-i18n
<mediawiki-i18n(a)lists.wikimedia.org>, Wikimedia developers
<wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
[ cross-posted to MediaWiki-i18n, Wikimedia-L and Wikitech-L ]
Dear Wikimedians,
The 2000th article that was written using the ContentTranslation
extension was published today.
Article #2000 was translated from English to Greek, and it's about
Škocjan Caves, a UNESCO World Heritage site in Slovenia.
Original: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%A0kocjan_Caves
Translated: https://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%A3%CF%80%CE%AE%CE%BB%CE%B1%CE%B9%CE%B1_%C…
In case you're wondering what ContentTranslation is, here's a brief
summary: ContentTranslation is an extension that helps Wikipedia
editors to create articles quickly and easily by translating them from
other languages. It's being developed by the Language Engineering
team. Its design started in the summer of 2013 and its coding started
in early 2014. You can find more info at
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/CX as well as in the following blog
posts:
* http://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/01/10/content-translation-beta-coming-soon/
* http://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/01/20/try-content-translation/
* http://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/04/06/content-translation-improved-my-edits/
* http://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/04/08/the-new-content-translation-tool/
Some more data about ContentTranslation:
* Our first deployment was in mid-January to Catalan, Spanish,
Portuguese, Esperanto, Norwegian Bokmal, Danish, Indonesian and Malay.
Now we support 43 languages, and this number is growing every week as
we extend the deployment (a special thank-you to the Ops and Release
Engineering people, who continuously and tirelessly support our
deployment effort).
* In all the Wikipedias in which ContentTranslation is deployed, it is
currently defined as a Beta feature, which means that it is only
available to logged-in users who opted into it in the preferences.
* The 1000th article was written on April 10th, so it took much less
to get to 2000 than to 1000.
* The language into which the most articles were translated is
Catalan: 762. The Catalan Wikipedia community always had a strong
inclination to translation, it was the first one that volunteered to
test the tool in labs in the summer of 2014 and provided a lot of
useful feedback, and it also has good machine translation support
thanks to the Freely-licensed Apertium engine.
* The second most popular target language is Spanish. It started
slowly in the first couple of months, but it's quickly growing since
March.
* Other target languages that are quickly growing lately are French,
Portuguese and Ukrainian.
* The language from which the largest number of articles is translated
is English. It is followed by Spanish, from which a lot of articles
are translated to the closely related Portuguese and Catalan.
* The total number of people who published at least one translated
article into any language is 663.
* Of more than 2000 articles that were created, about 60 were deleted,
so we have a reason to think that the quality of the created articles
is pretty OK.
* In Catalan we see that ContentTranslation has some influence on the
number of articles created per day - it was usually between 60 and 90
before 2015, and in January and February it was over a 100. It's too
early to say how does it influence other languages, but we are
optimistic ;)
* A community discussion about enabling the tool in the French
Wikipedia ended with 50 "votes" in support of the tool and 0 "votes"
against it ;)
Some of our plans for the coming months are:
* Enabling more languages, including big ones like English, Russian
and Italian, as well as right-to-left languages.
* Improving the support for links.
* Creating support for smart suggestions of articles to translate, as
well as "task lists" for translation projects.
* Starting to get the tool out of beta status :)
I'd like to thank all the Wikimedia volunteers around the planet who
are participating in this effort by translating articles, translating
the extension's user interface, testing the tool, assisting other
wikipedians to translate, organizing translation workshops, reporting
useful bugs, submitting patches, and generally proving day after day
what an incredible community they are - hard-working,
massively-multilingual, helpful, patient, creative and talented.
Thank you - we have a lot more to achieve together \o/
--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
--
Kartik Mistry/કાર્તિક મિસ્ત્રી | IRC: kart_
{kartikm, 0x1f1f}.wordpress.com
Dear Wikimedians,
This is my last day as the CIS-A2K Program Director.
The last 2 years and 3 months have been immensely exciting with tons of
learning and work!
I have loved meeting many Wikimedians, face to face, across the length and
breadth of India. The interactions I had with many of you have been
immensely useful to my learning.
The diversity of our community and the Wikimedia projects in India is so
rich and intricate - I wish I could map out my entire set of impressions to
only give a slight glimpse of it!!
Signing off as the Program Director for now. See you on-wiki, here on the
lists and in real life whenever our paths cross.
A quick update: The next A2K Program Director selection is under process
and hopefully we should all be able to welcome the new incumbent in June,
2015. Until then the A2K team is being internally monitored by CIS
leadership.
Best wishes,
Vishnu